アイン・ランドの資本主義観 : 反ビジネス文学風土の中でビジネスマンを祝福するAtlas Shrugged (生瀬克己教授追悼号)

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Ayn Rand's defense of capitalism has infuriated anti-capitalists, including many American intellectuals, especially American literary persons.This is part of why Ayn Rand remained outside academy throughout her life and also after her death.In popular usage in the context of literary criticism, the word "capitalism"is a synonym of evil. As Richard Hofstadter says, business and capitalism have been stigmatized by most American authors as the enemy of social justice. Yet we should notice that there have been few works in which capitalism is investigated enough to be proved as the enemy of social justice.The word "capitalism" was, in fact, coined by socialists, anti-capitalists,which means that "capitalism" has been presumably regarded as something negative to be conquered or corrected, without being fully defined. We cannot be too careful when noting how misleading the word "capitalism"can be.In such an anti-capitalist American intellectual milieu, Ayn Rand dared to refuse to renounce the concept of capitalism. She proclaims that capitalism is the only political-economic system based on the recognition of American values: individualism, democracy, and liberty.Ayn Rand's view of capitalism is derived from the following ideas: reality exists as an objective absolute, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears; reason is man's only means of perceiving reality, man's only source of knowledge, man's only guide of action, and man's means of survival; every man is an end in him/herself, not the means to the ends of others; man must exist for his/her own sake, neither sacrificing him/herself to others nor sacrificing others to him/herself; the pursuit of man's own rational self-interests based on a long-term vision and the achievement of his/her own happiness are the moral purposes of his/her life; therefore, the ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism, because it is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit; laissez-faire capitalism is a system where no man may obtain any value from others by resorting to physical force,and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others; the government acts only as a protector of man's rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; in a system of full capitalism, all human relationships are voluntary; men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own rational self-interests dictate; for the above-mentioned reasons, of all the social systems in human history, capitalism is the only system based on morality, though a pure system of capitalism has never yet existed even in America,where various degrees of government control have distorted it from the start; that is to say, capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future or the unknown ideal.Ayn Rand was not the only thinker that attempted to justify capitalism. However her defense of capitalism differs considerably from other justifications in that she articulated the moral superiority of capitalism. She did not view capitalism in the context of the Protestant work ethic, as Max Weber did. Though she accepted the theoretical arguments of Adam Smith and Austrian-school economists who see the market as the most efficient and productive mechanism, her view was not developed from utilitarian grounds.Paradoxically, a common indignation against social injustice is shared by Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. As she says, in fact there has never existed a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. Through human history, values and wealth have been too often acquired by exploitation and physical force, not by production or by fair trade. Marx noticed the alienation of the laborer who becomes estranged from the product of his/her labor, because he/she is forced to sell that product, and his/her labor-power as a product, on the market. Marx regarded the capitalist as a parasite on the production process by stressing that the capitalist labor process stunts the development of integrated human being.While Marx focused on the mechanism of capital, labor, and market, Ayn Rand concentrates on the abolition of physical force from human relationships. For her, individual rights, including the right to property, must not be violated, whether by the force of government or by that of man or group. What matters for Ayn Rand is the moral nature of human relationships: trust and fairness among individual human beings.Thus we can safely say that Ayn Rand's view of capitalism seems to be "humanistic"rather than "capitalistic." But this does not mean that her defense of capitalism as "humanism" is too naive, too fundamental to be seriously considered. Ayn Rand's defense of capitalism as a moral system makes readers recognize that protection of individual rights and creation of prosperity as its result depend on the spiritualization of political-economic life through the recognition and practice of morality.
2008-07-07

アイン・ランドの資本主義観 : 反ビジネス文学風土の中でビジネスマンを祝福するAtlas Shrugged (生瀬克己教授追悼号)

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